Chapter 64G of the General Laws imposes an excise on the transfer of occupancy of any room or rooms in a bed and breakfast establishment, hotel, lodging house, or motel in this Commonwealth by any operator. Id., § 3 . Exemptions from the excise are set out in G.L. c. 64G, § 2, and as these do not include an exemption for transfers to organizations such as *************, the excise applies to these transfers, unless they are otherwise exempt.

Under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, U.S. Const. Art. VI, sec. 2, federal law takes precedence over conflicting state law dealing with the same subject matter. As a result, a Massachusetts tax statute cannot be enforced in the face of clear federal law requiring another result. See e.g., Ace Property & Casualty Insur. Co. v. Commissioner of Revenue, 2002 Mass. LEXIS 407 (June 28, 2002). Here, *********** is a government-sponsored enterprise, chartered under *****************, and ************************, the Corporation is exempt "from all taxation now or hereafter imposed . . . by any state, county, municipal or local taxing authority. . ." except for taxes on real property. Id. As this statute clearly exempts ************************ from all taxes except property taxes, the c. 64G excise cannot be imposed on transfers of occupancy to ***********.

The Commissioner has issued prior guidance dealing with exemptions such as the one at issue. In this case, the Commissioner will use the same substantiation procedures and evidence for the Corporation and its employees as those set forth in DD 03-7, whether for federal employees who use cards where the government is billed directly, or for federal employees who themselves pay for the occupancy and are later reimbursed by the government. Id. Operators of establishments subject to the excise must retain documentation sufficient to substantiate any claim for exemption from G.L. c. 64G.

Tool Name: Baynote, Inc. Recommendations

The information below summarizes privacy policy terms related to content recommendations on Mass.Gov and is excerpted from the full Mass.gov privacy policy.

Purpose: Displays relevant content recommendation based on the site usage pattern of all users of Mass.Gov. If Personalization is enabled (the default setting), your personal site usage pattern today and on prior visits to Mass.gov will be displayed to you and will also be a factor in determining personalized relevant recommendations for you.

Data Collected: A random anonymous unique identifier is assigned and tracked for each user of the website. This identifier is sent to our vendor, Baynote, when you view a page, open a document or click a link on Mass.Gov. Our vendor then analyzes the specific content that was viewed and provides content recommendations to similar content that you may find useful. A full description of what data Baynote collects and how it uses this data is available at http://www.baynote.com/baynote-services-privacy-policy/. Please note that the tool uses persistent cookies. These cookies will be Mass.gov domain cookies and not Baynote domain cookies. The cookies will store information related to a user’s Mass.gov Web site usage, including the URL and title of sites recently visited and the random anonymous unique identifier assigned to the user. In general, and as described in more detail in Baynote’s service privacy policy linked to above, Baynote only uses the personalized information it gathers to provide recommendation services and display past usage for Mass.Gov users and will not share this information with any third parties, including advertisers. The information collected will not affect content you may see on sites unaffiliated with Mass.Gov.

Express Opt Out: If personalization of recommendations based on the content you view is not desired, or you do not wish to display a list of recently viewed Mass.gov pages, you may turn personalization off. You can do this by using either the switch located below in this privacy policy or an identical switch located directly above the content recommendations and recently viewed content boxes displayed on the Mass.gov site. Once you turn off personalization, your content recommendations will be based on the overall traffic patterns of all users of Mass.Gov and they will not specifically take into account your own personal usage patterns. If you turn off personalization, information collected by this Tool that is associated with your content usage will be deleted from your cookies, and no further information about your content usage will be sent to our vendor.

Disabling personalization will affect both content recommendations and recently viewed page links. If you turn off personalization, this “off” setting will persist as you browse Mass.Gov and during any future sessions. The opt-out setting is stored in a persistent cookie on your computer. The setting will remain in effect so long as you use the same computer with the same Internet browser. If you delete the cookie that contains the opt-out setting or use a different browser or computer, personalization will be enabled and you will need to disable it again on your next visit, if desired.

For our full privacy policy, please close this window and see the Site Policies or Privacy Policy link in the footer of the page.